Pokemon Diamond/Pearl - Gotta catch 'em all, one more time!

[Dexie Oblivion]

I'm sitting in a mansion, deep within the Sinnoh region of Japan. Before me, a rather pompous man stands, telling me how wonderful his trophy garden is.  I yawn, not really interested, until he mentions something of note...it just so happens that today, his garden is invested with wild Meowth. Gleeful at the news, I hurry back to begin my hunt. After I find one, I might decide to go fossil hunting underground for a while....or will I? The dance contest is pretty tempting, but I need to check today's lottery numbers, too, before I forget....and I STILL need to hunt down the legendary volcano treasure at Stark Mountain...

To say there's a lot to do in Pokemon Diamond/Pearl is an understatement. I currently have 77+ hours on my game clock, and I STILL have a ton of things I need to do in-game. I beat the game's final set of bosses at about 65 hours in, and I've been playing since the original games...newcomers to the Pokemon franchise will probably take even longer to defeat them, and even more time invested into the post-game content.

Let's get some basic stuff out of the way before I continue, though. Graphically, Diamond/Pearl isn't too much better than it's GBA predecessors. There's some nice usage of 3D here and there, but for the most part, it's all bright, beautiful 2D, which isn't really a bad thing.

Musically....wow. The main series Pokemon titles have always had good music, but D/P really surprised me. It's all extremely well done and fitting, and the new battle themes are just freaking badass, to be blunt (Cyrus Battle Theme FTW, kthx!).

The online portions are great. You can battle or direct trade with someone if you have their friend code, and if not? You can use the Global Trade System. This neat little feature lets you upload a Pokemon to Nintendo's servers, and specify what you want in return for it. Should someone accept your trade, they'll download your monster to their game, upload the one you want, and you can return later to pick it up.

The core gameplay remains the same as the previous titles...pick a starter Pokemon, and travel around the world, capturing more monsters to do your bidding, as well as kicking the ass of the Sinnoh region's 8 gym leaders. Along the way, there's a subplot about Team Galactic wanting to create a new world, and of course you have a plucky rival to deal with. Battles still use the rock-paper-scissors-fire-water-ice-etc-etc styled one-on-one battles, though there's a few places someone will join up with you to fight 2-on-2 against other trainers.

It's all standard stuff for the series, really. It's all the little extras, though, that make the game special...

As I mentioned in my opening, there's a TON of things you can do, both during the main quest and after. Game Freak really went the extra mile with D/P, adding in so much content and such, that I can definately say this is one of the DS's top five games, hands down.

In fact? I can safely say that Pokemon Diamond/Pearl is the best set of games released in the franchise thus far, even beating out the absolutely steller Gold/Silver/Crystal on the Game Boy Color. The game just has so much to do, so much polish, and is still so addicting, it's hard to find faults with it.

I could go on, listing all the great things about the game (The Poketch! Wifi Battle Tower! Super Contests! The Sinnoh Underground), but I won't.   I'll just close out with one small complaint...

Damnit. :P Why is it that when we finally get a Bug specialist into the Elite 4, he has to be such a loser? XP